Living with Rebecca | Books | The Guardian Fiction Living with Rebecca Sally Beauman has written a companion novel to Daphne du Maurier's 1938 classic Rebecca. She explains why she felt compelled to give du Maurier's silent heroine a voice, and describes the strange sensation of being haunted by a fictional character. Haunted by Rebecca: Sally Beauman Sally Beauman Wednesday 12 September 2001 07.29 EDT First published on Wednesday 12 September 2001 07.29 EDT Share on Messenger Close How do books begin? Where do they come from? This is a question novelists are always being asked - and I've always found it difficult to answer. In my own case, usually, I start to see scenes, or hear voices. I get glimpses of a character, or a situation, and I know they may lead the way to the next book. They usually come to me as I'm approaching the end of the previous novel, and they're always shadowy and elusive, like the snatches of a dream. But my new novel Rebecca's Tale had a very different gestation.

When it's published this September, it will be nearly seven years since I first thought of it - and seven years is a very long time to be pregnant. It will be a relief, finally, to give birth. As the title indicates, my book is linked to Daphne du Maurier's 1938 classic novel, Rebecca. But it is not, and was never intended to be, a sequel. On the whole, I dislike and distrust sequels, and those that I've read have always been pale shadows of the original. It can be read by those who know Rebecca intimately, and by those who have never read du Maurier's book (and for them, there's a treat in store). In other words, my novel is deeply indebted to du Maurier's but also, I hope, free and independent of it. We certainly return to Manderley, but we look at that dark and resonant fictional domain from a very different angle, and there are some surprises in store. I'd always been deeply interested in du Maurier's work, and I've always felt it had been much misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Du Maurier herself resented the tag 'romantic novelist', which attached itself to her during her lifetime, and still obstinately adheres now: she felt it was unjust - and I agree with her. Some of her novels may fall within the romance category, but Rebecca, I believe, does not. If anything, it is an anti-romance - a clever, cunning and subversive attack on the very genre to which it would be consigned. Yet at the time of publication, that aspect of the novel was ignored, and the novel's ambivalences remain relatively uninvestigated to this day. Why? It was when I first began to ask myself that question that the seeds of my own Rebecca's Tale were sown. It was late in 1993, and I was writing an article about du Maurier, and Rebecca, for New Yorker magazine. The more closely I looked at the book, the more fascinated I became. Du Maurier's publisher, Victor Gollancz, had received the manuscript with jubilation. He predicted it would be a huge bestseller (and of course he was correct; Rebecca has never been out of print since).

In his view, it was "an exquisite love story" - and he duly promoted it as such. In the run-up to publication, du Maurier's was the sole dissenting voice. She feared the novel was too dark to win popular readership; she saw it, she told Gollancz, as "grim". I think she was right. I also think (and du Maurier was too modest to make such claims) Rebecca is a brilliant, astonishing and prescient novel. You could argue that, in Mrs de Winter, the famously 'anonymous' second wife who tells the story, she created the first unreliable narrator in popular fiction. De Winter is a narrator so convincing and so persuasive that most readers never look beyond the gaucheries of her prose, and never notice the devices du Maurier uses to undermine it. Certainly, reviewers leapt to the assumption that the narrator's views and the author's were one and the same. Examine Rebecca closely, and you begin to see how wrong they were.

The novel may seem to celebrate the sweet 'feminine' virtues embodied in the second Mrs de Winter - obedience, modesty, sexual inexperience, naivety, a willingness to conform to male ideas as to suitable female or wifely behaviour - but does it actually do that? No. The woman who rises triumphant from the novel is Rebecca, the disobedient and profoundly transgressive first wife. That she does so is an extraordinary technical feat on du Maurier's part. Rebecca is dead when the novel commences; she neither speaks nor appears in it; she is the antithesis of conventional female virtue, yet she burns the imagination. Vengeful, rebellious, indestructible and superb, she rises from the dead to avenge herself on the husband who has killed her. She destroys him, his house and the entire social structure he represents - and, like the woman in Sylvia Plath's poem who boasts 'I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air', she achieves a terrifying, mythic stature. This female avatar is dangerous - and she haunts the reader long after the last page is turned. It was then, writing my New Yorker article, that I first began to imagine her story.

How would it be if one altered the camera angle, and looked at events at Manderley from the first wife's point of view? I thought of Jean Rhys's fascinating novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which tells the story of Bertha Rochester's early life, and rescues her from the madwoman's attic to which Charlotte Bronte confined her in Jane Eyre. Du Maurier's novel, of course, has many deliberate echoes of Bronte's. So I wondered, what would one discover if one looked at Manderley, that quintessential male domain, from Rebecca's point of view? In 1938, it would have been very difficult for a novelist to do that, certainly a novelist like du Maurier, who was aiming at a wide readership. The proprieties of her time had to be observed; if she intended to celebrate Rebecca (and I think she did), she could not do so openly: she was forced to take a covert approach. There are no such restrictions now. So who was Rebecca? Where did she come from? Was she the unprincipled and promiscuous woman that her gentleman husband claimed - or something other?

Du Maurier deliberately occludes Rebecca's past; she gives only the tiniest of hints, hidden away in the narrative - but that was fine, from my point of view. It meant I was free to invent, free to imagine. And from the moment I finished writing the New Yorker article, that was what I began to do. Time passed, however. I was working on other novels, and I pushed Manderley to the back of my mind. Then, some three years ago now, I was invited to speak at the du Maurier festival in Cornwall, and while there met du Maurier's son, Christian Browning. I talked to him at unpardonable length about my Rebecca ideas; he listened with generosity and patience and finally (I'll always be grateful to him for this leap of faith) he turned to me and said, "If it interests you that much, why don't you do it?" The next day, electric with nerves, I took the train back to London. I thought about the book that would become Rebecca's Tale the entire way. By the time I arrived at Paddington, some four hours later, I had the entire shape of the book blocked out in my mind.

I knew I wanted multiple narrators, so the text was destabilised and no one character could be regarded as the repository of narrative truth. I knew I wanted the book to have a gender divide, so it was split fifty-fifty, male/female, at its heart. I knew that, honouring du Maurier's novel, this book should ask questions rather than provide pat answers. And I knew that, if I was to make it work as it could and should work, I had to find a voice for Rebecca herself: if I didn't do that, and do it convincingly, the book was stillborn. It is for others to decide if I've been successful in that aim. All I can say is that to write in Rebecca's voice was an extraordinary experience - one of the strangest episodes I can recall. I usually write 'cold' - very cold. I like to be distanced from my material. I write, and rewrite, endlessly, circling my subject matter in a slow, crab-like way. When I came to write the 'Rebecca' section of this book, none of that pertained.

All I knew when I began was that this voice had to come from the very edge; I had to push it as far as I dared. So I started - and I found I was writing fast, so fast that it felt like taking dictation. At times, I felt I was struggling to keep up - and that was both exhilarating and unnerving. It's not something that's ever happened to me before; I don't expect it to happen again - nor am I sure I would want it to do so. That experience can't be explained. You could call it a haunting, I suppose, or a possession. But one of the central concerns of Rebecca's tale is suppression - the ways in which, even today, the male viewpoint and the male voice, tends to dominate, while the female, the soprano voice, is drowned out by the swelling chorus of bass and baritone. That's as true, one might suggest, of literature as it is of - say - politics. So perhaps that's why it felt as if Rebecca grabbed her chance at an aria; she'd been written out, or silenced, too long.

Daphne du Maurier always said her novel Rebecca was a study in jealousy - Telegraph Books Daphne du Maurier always said her novel Rebecca was a study in jealousy Seventy-five years after Daphne du Maurier published 'Rebecca’, her son tells Christian House how the author’s own torrid life inspired this enduring story The seed of the Rebecca story lay in Daphne du Maurier's jealousy of her husband's first fiancee Photo: REX By Christian House Comments 'Very roughly, the book will be about the influence of a first wife on a second,” wrote Daphne du Maurier in her notes. “Until wife 2 is haunted day and night… a tragedy is looming very close and crash! Bang! Something happens.” Seventy-five years ago this month, Rebecca was published, and readers flooded bookshops to discover the dark nature of that “something”. The novel was to be du Maurier’s masterpiece and a classic of 20th-century fiction that continues to enthral today.

“It goes on and it goes on,” says Kits Browning, du Maurier’s son, leaning back in his sofa at Ferryside, the house in Fowey, in Cornwall, that has been in the du Maurier family since the Twenties. “It’s the old cliché. It’s a bloody good story. And it still sells more than any of her other books.” An impressive 4,000 a month, by the reckoning of its publishers Virago, and it has never been out of print. A film-maker and photographer by profession, Browning first read it “more in visual terms” but has re-read it many times, and “I always find different things about it”. With his matinee-idol wave of hair and yacht-club bonhomie, at 72, Browning retains a jovial manner. Ferryside, perched on the Fowey estuary, was once part of a boatyard, and as we discuss the legacy of Rebecca, boat horns and the scream of gulls echo in from the water.

Related Articles Growing up in the house that inspired 'Rebecca' 26 Apr 2013 It was to this house that Daphne du Maurier returned in 1937 from Egypt, where her husband, Major Tommy “Boy” Browning, commanding officer of the Second Battalion, Grenadier Guards, was stationed in Alexandria. It was in Egypt that she had sketched out the story of Rebecca; in Ferryside, she got down to serious writing, surrounded by the squalls and sails that feature in the doom-laden narrative. The novel’s nameless young narrator is perplexed by her volatile new husband, Maxim de Winter, the rich owner of the grand Cornish estate, Manderley. Maxim is the kind of charmer who proposes by snapping: “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool.” His first wife, the glorious but perhaps malevolent Rebecca, drowned in a sailing accident, but her spirit remains, infused in the masonry of Manderley and the seething glare of its housekeeper, Mrs Danvers. In August 1938, Rebecca caught the zeitgeist, drawing on the glamour of country society and the feeling of impending catastrophe that permeated the pre-war years.

Put coarsely, it is a novel about a dead woman and a house. Both of which were drawn from the author’s life. “Mum used to get fed up talking about it,” says Browning. “She did get so irritated with people calling it a romantic novel. Because she always said it was a study in jealousy.” The seed of the story lay in du Maurier’s jealousy of Jan Ricardo, the first fiancée of her husband. “I know that she came across one or two letters or cards, fairly sort of harmless things, where Jan did sign 'Jan Ricardo’ with this wonderful great R,” says Browning, flourishing his hand in the air. It is a portentous curlicue that is emulated in the book. “The name Rebecca,” wrote du Maurier, “stood out black and strong, the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters.” Ricardo later threw herself under a train, although not, Browning says, due to his parents’ marriage. Still, it is said that Daphne was haunted by the suspicion that her husband remained attracted to Ricardo.

Manderley was based on Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire, which du Maurier visited in her youth, but she placed it in the setting of Menabilly, the home she leased, hidden away in the woods by the Gribbin Head outside Fowey, and where the family moved after Ferryside. “She always had this thing that places were more important than people,” explains Browning; and, indeed, while she was in Egypt, she had confessed to missing the then-abandoned house of Menabilly more than her two children (Kits had yet to be born). It was at Milton Hall that she conceived of Mrs Danvers. “She saw this tall, dark housekeeper woman. They were always called Mrs, even if they weren’t married, like Mrs Hudson in Sherlock Holmes,” says Browning. “That’s where she first saw this terribly sinister-looking lady. I don’t think she ever spoke to her, it was just a look that sunk in.” Manderley, like Hogwarts and Brideshead, is a name fixed in our imagination. Yet the anonymity of the novel’s narrator continues to intrigue. “She couldn’t think what to call her and so she didn’t call her anything.

And then it became a challenge: could she actually write the whole thing without it,” says Browning. “Funnily enough, in the Hitchcock film, in the script she is written as 'I’, but they all called her 'Daphne’ on the shoot.” Both Mrs de Winters were drawn from du Maurier’s own character. “I always identified Mum with the second, rather timid one,” says Browning. “It was totally split, because she was just as good as Rebecca at the sailing and all that toughness.” And what about Rebecca’s cruel streak; did she possess that? “No. But, there again, who says it was cruelty? It’s Maxim’s version, isn’t it? There’s so much in that book, you know. Was he lying? Why is it that everybody else thought the sun shone out of her a---? There’s never a bad word about Rebecca except from Max. That’s why it runs and runs.” Laurence Olivier immortalised the moody figure of Maxim in Alfred Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning 1940 film. “Mum loved it.

She thought it was great.” Olivier had originally wanted to play opposite Vivien Leigh, “but it would be ridiculous because if Vivien Leigh played the second Mrs de Winter, she’d have fired Mrs Danvers on the first morning,” chuckles Browning. Instead, Joan Fontaine excelled as the naïve innocent caught in Mrs Danvers’s sights. Born in London in 1907, into a wealthy family, Daphne was the second of three daughters. A tomboy – and her actor father’s favourite – she preferred visiting Ferryside, the family’s remote holiday home, to participating in London society. She married the charismatic Boy Browning, who later became Prince Philip’s treasurer, after a three-month courtship when she was 25 and he 35. One of the du Maurier sisters had first spotted the handsome Browning sailing his boat in Fowey harbour; he had actually set out there after reading du Maurier’s first novel, The Loving Spirit, falling in love with her graphic descriptions of the Cornish coastline. Their marriage was stable, despite infidelities on both sides, and they went on to have three children: Tessa, Flavia and Christian (known as “Kits”).

It was quite clear that Kits was her favourite, and she doted on him. Biographers have described her as an aloof mother, especially towards her daughters, and nannies and housekeepers were employed to occupy them as she wrote. Du Maurier has also been described as something of a recluse, shunning publicity and social invitations. Yet Kits remembers her as being funny and warm. “As a mother and as a grandmother to our kids, she was the most wonderful and easy-going person, who’d join in and play cricket or football with the kids and all that. She wasn’t at all aloof. But she was very fond of her privacy.” The novel has repeatedly been adapted for stage and screen, with du Maurier herself writing the first theatrical treatment. As his mother’s literary executor following her death in 1989, Browning has been pivotal in their promotion. “Since the original film, I’ve been involved in so many touring plays of it,” with a range of actors playing Maxim. “Simon Williams. He was so good. And Nigel Havers, of course. The production they did three or four years ago did fantastically well.

He does bring ’em in.” Her estate, he admits, has a responsibility to the reputation of the book. Two well-received incidental novels have been authorised – Susan Hill’s Mrs de Winter and Sally Beauman’s Rebecca’s Tale. And one of Browning’s three sons, Ned, has designed a collection of Swiss-made du Maurier watches – the Maxim for men, the Rebecca for ladies – following the lead of his dapper great-grandfather, the thespian Gerald du Maurier, who launched a brand of du Maurier cork-tipped cigarettes. There has even been Rebecca: The Musical, which had a three-year run in Vienna before moving to Japan, Germany, South Korea and Sweden. “It is absolutely fantastic as a spectacle. Almost as Mrs Danvers comes to the top of the stairs, there’s a sort of 'boo’. It’s like pantomime,” says Browning. What, I wonder, might his mother have made of it? “I think she’d be delighted. It’s a very gothic version.” So what’s next for this classic? Well, Browning announces, “we’re coming full circle with it because we’re just about to sign an option for a remake. Cinema.

Big cinema.” Colin Firth is the only leading man he can think of for Maxim. And Mrs Danvers? “Doing fantasy trip, you’ve got to have a Meryl Streep. Or Glenn Close, she’d be good.” And will the Thirties setting remain? Browning pauses to consider a modern take. “You can’t really set it today. You wouldn’t have butlers today, would you? Unless you’re a footballer. Wayne Rooney, you rang m’lord?” Browning buckles over with laughter, drowning out the gulls. “No, you couldn’t do it like that.” Daphne Du Maurier Cornwall | Memorial Room | Jamaica Inn Daphne du Maurier Daphne du Maurier was born in London in 1907, the second daughter of Muriel and Gerald du Maurier. Born into a talented, theatrical and artistic family, she was blessed from an early age with a vivid imagination and a desire to write. This desire was nurtured further by her immediate love for Cornwall, after her parents purchased a holiday home at Bodinnick near Fowey on the coast.

It was whilst staying there, at the house re-named Ferryside, she wrote her first novel The Loving Spirit (published in 1931). A story set in the fictitious town of Plyn, it was woven around the lives of local Cornish boat builders and their history. In 1932 Daphne du Maurier married Major Frederick Browning and in 1943 while he was at war, she moved to Cornwall with their three children. Browning was Commander of the 1st Airborne Division in Operation Market Garden in September 1944, portrayed controversially in film by Dirk Bogarde. He is credited with the famous phrase, in the planning of the operation, 'We may be going a bridge too far'. He was knighted in 1946 and ended his military career with the rank of Lieutenant-General. Daphne went on to become one of the most successful authors of her time. Her most famous works include Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, My Cousin Rachel, The Birds and of course, her first big commercial success, Jamaica Inn.

She was created a Dame in 1969, making her Lady Browning; Dame Daphne du Maurier DBE, but she never used the title. Daphne du Maurier's passing in 1989 was a great loss, both to literature and to Cornwall. In memory of her, a room was created here at Jamaica Inn which is full of memorabilia, including her Sheraton writing desk on top of which is a packet of the du Maurier cigarettes named after her father. There's also a dish of Glacier Mints - Dame Daphne's favourite sweets. Some of her books were turned into very successful films including Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine as well as The Birds, starring Tippi Hendren and Rod Taylor. The 1939 film of Jamaica Inn starring Charles Laughton and Maureen O'Hara featured a new ending, apparently demanded by Laughton. All three films were directed by Alfred Hitchcock. During her career Daphne du Maurier wrote a total of thirty-eight books, but it is the Cornish-based novels that remain the most popular with her readers.

Novel Inspiration On a cold and eerie night in 1930, writer Daphne du Maurier arrived at Jamaica Inn high on the windswept Bodmin Moor. The following day she went riding with a friend but mist suddenly came down, they got lost and it started to get dark. In the end they saved themselves by dismounting and seeing if their horses would lead them back, which thankfully they did. Daphne stayed a few more nights to recover from the ordeal and learned about the legendary history of Jamaica Inn including the smuggling that had gone on there. This, the atmosphere of the hostelry and the wild moor inspired her to write her famous and compelling novel, Jamaica Inn. The story tells the tale of Mary, an orphan who goes to live with her Aunt Patience and Uncle Joss Merlyn, the terrifying landlord of Jamaica Inn, and the mystery surrounding her uncle's involvement in smuggling along the Cornish coast. Smugglers Museum... The Smugglers Museum houses one of the finest collections of smuggling artefacts in the country. Featuring 'The History of Jamaica Inn', an educational and historical film show... Read more > Bumps in the night...

Many people who have stayed at the Inn have reported strange incidents occurring at night. Popular TV programme ‘Most Haunted’ featured Jamaica Inn in what they said was one of the spookiest episodes... Read more > Learn about us... Jamaica Inn was built in 1750 as a coaching inn for weary travellers. Using the turnpike between Launceston and Bodmin, they would stay at the Inn after having crossed the wild... Britain Magazine | The official magazine of Visit Britain | Best of British History, Royal Family,Travel and Culture - Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall Latest issue Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall With tales of romance, smugglers and secrecy, author Daphne du Maurier wrote spellbinding novels inspired by the drama of the Cornish landscape. Du Maurier drew her inspiration for Manderley from the Cornish mansion of Menabilly © Chichester Partnership Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” writes Daphne du Maurier in the famous opening sentence of her novel Rebecca. She was known for channelling her feelings for cherished landscapes to inform her creativity, and in Rebecca this wistful line comes from the author’s homesickness for her beloved Cornwall.

Du Maurier was born in London in 1907 but it was the dramatic landscape of England’s most south-westerly county, which she first experienced at the age of 19 on a trip to Fowey, that excited her imagination and became the backdrop to her most memorable fiction. The initial drive to Fowey, along country lanes with clifftop views, was something du Maurier remembered for her whole life. When she was nearly 60, she wrote about the impact of that moment: “The hired car swept round the curve of the hill and suddenly the full expanse of Fowey harbour was spread beneath us … like the gateway to another world. My spirits soared.” Fowey (pronounced ‘Foy’) is now at the centre of what has been dubbed ‘du Maurier country’ and is a pretty port with an illustrious history – it sent ships to join the battle against the Spanish Armada in 1588. It is a picturesque place to visit, with its narrow tiers of pastel-coloured cottages winding down to the attractive harbour where small yachts with bright sails nip across the water.

The poet Robert Bridges described Fowey as “the most poetic-looking place in England” and it provided inspiration for Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows – he is said to have modelled Toad Hall on Fowey Hall, now the Fowey Hall Hotel. Boats moored on Pont Pill with Polruan and the River Fowey in the distance © Alamy Du Maurier would have taken the little vehicle ferry that journeys from Bodinnick on the eastern side of the Fowey estuary (it is still running today and there is a pedestrian ferry from the old fishing village of Polruan, slightly further down). She also frequented the 400-year-old Ferry Inn and it was on the way here on her first visit that du Maurier spotted a house perched between the cliffside and the river, named Swiss Cottage, which the family promptly bought and renamed Ferryside. “Here was the freedom I desired,” she said. “Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone.” For du Maurier this magical place did indeed provide a gateway into another world – it was here that her writing took off.

She loved the coastal existence, learning to sail and fish and starting the long walks that were to become a habit throughout her life. She confided in her diary: “I think Fowey means more to me than anything now. The river, the harbour, the sea. It’s much more than love for a person.” On her adventures she soaked up the atmosphere of Cornwall’s wild countryside so that its places, people and unique inspirations began to materialise in her work. Her first novel The Loving Spirit, for example, came from one of her excursions to a sheltered tidal creek off the Fowey River by Pont Pill. Here she found the wrecked schooner Jane Slade whose carved figurehead excited her imagination. Du Maurier researched the family of the woman represented by the figurehead, and in the novel Jane Slade became Janet Coombe. The story chronicles the lives of four generations of a Cornish boat-building family living in the fictional town of Plyn, unmistakably the landscape of Polruan.

A 14th-century block house, from which a chain could be pulled up across the river to prevent the entrance of unwanted vessels, can be seen today at the head of the estuary, towards the open sea of St Austell Bay – a reminder that this coast was once a popular haunt of pirates. A portrait of du Maurier in 1932 © Constance Collier In a hopelessly romantic real-life story, it was this book that was to introduce du Maurier to her future husband. Major Tommy Browning was so affected by the novel that he sailed his yacht to Fowey in search of the author. They fell in love and in July 1932 were married at medieval St Wyllow’s Church in Lanteglos-by-Fowey – Jane Slade is buried in the graveyard. Many of the landmarks that du Maurier loved around Fowey can be identified in The Loving Spirit and as she wrote more (by the time it was published in 1932, she had written another book and was halfway through a third) she ventured further afield.

She travelled to the Lizard Peninsula, the southernmost point of Cornwall, and to Trelowarren Estate there, home to the Vyvyan family. Du Maurier described the Gothic, atmospheric house and grounds at Trelowarren as “the most beautiful place imaginable” and was struck by its spooky long drive of holm oaks with dark, intertwining branches. The friend she made here, Clara Vyvyan, frequently visited a tributary of the Helford River nearby called Frenchman’s Creek, and it was to this remote spot that du Maurier and her new husband came for their honeymoon. Du Maurier’s dashing tale of love and adventure of the same name was published in 1941. The heroine Dona St Columb vividly describes her first impressions of the secret spot: “Suddenly, before her for the first time, was the creek, still and soundless, shrouded by the trees, hidden from the eyes of men.” The creek is still isolated and peaceful today. At low tide, the skeletons of dead trees are revealed, black and dripping in the water, and abandoned boats are beached, although you are unlikely to find a dashing foreign pirate.

You can soak up the romance of the place, however, in dreamy Frenchman’s Creek Cottage, once rented by Clara Vyvyan and now owned by the Landmark Trust. On another of her expeditions, in November 1930, du Maurier went riding on Bodmin Moor to the north of Fowey and, alarmingly lost in a thick fog, came across the Jamaica Inn Temperance Hotel. It had been a stop for stage and mail coaches travelling from Penzance or Falmouth to London, and it was easy for her to picture the “grim landmark” in a tempestuous past, when smuggling was rampant. The legendary coaching house of Jamaica Inn © Corbis Her novel Jamaica Inn captures the forbidding bleakness of the moor that can still hold true today, especially in the grip of one of the sudden changes of weather to which it is prone.

Her heroine Mary Yellan describes the sinister desolation of the place: “On either side of the road the country stretched interminably into space … mile upon mile of bleak moorland, dark and untraversed, rolling like a desert land to some unseen horizon.” Jamaica Inn, to be found between Bodmin and Launceston, has gained notoriety for allegedly being one of the most haunted places in Britain. Hugely tourist focused now, it contains The Museum of Smuggling, recalling a time when the Cornwall coast was the most popular location for smuggling of silks, tea, tobacco and brandy into England. For those on the trail of du Maurier, a more authentically atmospheric destination is nearby Dozmary Pool. The bottomless lake of legend, into which King Arthur’s sword Excalibur was thrown, was a place that the author certainly visited. In fact, she knew the moor well, from the pretty village of Altarnun, so at odds with the sinister connections in Jamaica Inn, to the highest tor, Brown Willy (whose name rather ruins its Cornish origins, Bron Wennyly, meaning ‘hill of swallows’).

Pont Creek © Christian Browning Of course the building that du Maurier is most associated with, and that was more significant to her than any other, was waiting to be discovered. She wrote that she had glimpsed a roof deep in the “enchanted woods” below Gribbin Head to the west of Fowey and set out to find more about this “house of secrets”. The ivy-covered grey stone manor was called Menabilly, and was hidden behind wrought-iron gates where an “eerie and most ghostlike atmosphere” awaited on the impassable drive. The local legend was that the house, part of the private estate of the Rashleigh family and passed down since Tudor times, was haunted. But du Maurier was fascinated with the place and returned often to trespass through the wild grounds of tangled holly and rhododendrons, once climbing in through an unlatched window to wander through dusty rooms. She wrote about her feelings for the house in 1932, saying, “I’m here, I’m happy, I’m home.” However, Menabilly remained purely a preoccupation for du Maurier for many years, especially once her husband’s regiment was posted to Egypt in 1936.

She detested Alexandria and longed to return to Cornwall. It was during this time though that the seeds of Rebecca were sown – her longing for Menabilly and Cornwall is manifested in the character of the second Mrs de Winter who forms a strong attachment with her new house: Manderley. Published in 1938, Rebecca was a sensation and within the first few weeks 100,000 copies had been sold. Film adaptations and stage plays followed, which kept du Maurier busy, now in London. But in April 1942 she finally moved back to Fowey. She could not live at Ferryside, as the Royal Navy had requisitioned it, so she rented 8 Readymoney Cove, a pretty white house perched right on the water’s edge by a small bay between pretty Covington Woods and the grand mansion of Point Neptune. Returning to Menabilly, she found the house even more derelict after years of neglect. Determined to save it, she contacted owner Dr Rashleigh who agreed to let it to her – dry rot, leaking roof and all.

Her husband was far away in Tunis, occupied with the war, so du Maurier turned all her energies to restoring her dream home and by the end of the year, amazingly, it was ready for habitation. She and her children loved the grounds, which were full of azaleas in the spring, and the woods that blossomed with snowdrops, daffodils, bluebells and wild garlic. They swam in the sea, picnicked at Menabilly Beach and lived a quiet, idyllic countryside existence, quite cut off from the rest of the world. Du Maurier wrote in 1946: “At midnight, when the children sleep, and all is hushed and still, I sit down at the piano and look at the panelled walls, and slowly, softly, with no one there to see, the house whispers her secrets, and the secrets turn to stories.” Pendennis Castle is one of the finest fortresses built by King Henry VIII and features in The King’s General © Alamy With her happiness in her new home came more novels.

In Cavalier romance The King’s General (1946) she blended fact and fiction to write about Menabilly during the English Civil War – the action ranges across Cornwall from Launceston Castle to Lanhydrock, now owned by the National Trust. Pendennis Castle, built by King Henry VIII in the 1540s just outside Falmouth, features strongly. My Cousin Rachel (1951) includes recognisable elements of du Maurier’s daily life: the rhododendrons, the mill cottage on the beach, the favoured spots for swimming; and Menabilly, though unnamed, is surely the mansion that Philip Ashley cherished. Her 13th novel, Castle Dor (1962) takes its name from the Iron Age fort on the west bank of the River Fowey, once home to the legendary King Mark and setting for the ultimate Cornish love story – Tristan and Iseult. Walking in the footsteps of the author is not difficult, for her writing is suffused with recognisable elements of the Cornish countryside. Stroll up to Gribbin Head, for example, and follow the path down to Polridmouth Beach (pronounced Pridmouth).

A notorious black spot for shipwrecks, the bay here still has some of the brooding atmosphere that permeates Rebecca. The pebble beach backs onto a freshwater lake, fed by a stream emerging from high above within the dark woods of the Menabilly estate, and the lonely former mill house can easily be imagined as the “cottage on the beach” where Rebecca met her lover. Menabilly itself remains a mysterious presence on the landscape – du Maurier’s “house of secrets” has, perhaps fittingly, reverted to quiet seclusion. It was returned to the Rashleighs in 1969 when she moved to Kilmarth, the dower house of the Menabilly estate and her final home. At Kilmarth she was inspired to write her penultimate novel The House on the Strand (1969), her interest piqued by the home’s cellars where she found the remains of experiments by the previous tenant. For this novel, which dips in and out of 14th-century Cornwall, she immersed herself in research to discover how the landscape had changed and began to “see the whole countryside in a 14th-century way”.

Local landmarks again feature strongly, from Kilmarth to the almshouses at the base of Polmear Hill, to the nearby villages – all wonderful places to visit today. In du Maurier’s stories, places become as vitally important as people and are characters in their own right. And throughout her work, there is no bigger character than Cornwall. In 1967 she produced a coffee-table book entitled Vanishing Cornwall. It was a chance for her to proclaim her love for her adopted county. “A county known and loved in all its moods becomes woven into the pattern of life, something to be shared. As one who sought to know it long ago … in a quest for freedom, and later put down roots and found content, I have come a small way up the path. The beauty and the mystery beckon still.” For more information on Daphne du Maurier’s life in Cornwall see Daphne du Maurier At Home by Hilary Macaskill , which explores the homes and landscapes of du Maurier’s life, illustrated with little-seen material from the family archive. Published by Frances Lincoln, £25, hardback.

Written by Jessica Tooze // 2nd January 2014 Get a Quote Overview Discover challenging and dramatic walking trails shaped by the footsteps of traders, smugglers, saints and pirates. Cornish walking trails will reveal ancient tin mines, clifftop castles, timeless fishing villages and wild moors as you travel through a landscape of huge cliffs and hidden coves that goes back to the depths of time itself. In between the coastal drama, iconic harbours such as St Ives and Padstow give walkers access to some of the UK‘s best restaurants and coastal hotels. A county encircled by the wild Atlantic ocean, there is over 330 miles of spectacular world class coast path here taking you around the farthest corners of England - put simply it feels like walking on the edge of the world. Get a Quote Overview Stretching from coast to coast across the southwest of England, Devon is a richly diverse county with rugged shores and cliffs in the north, and classic Victorian seaside resorts in the south. In between you'll find tranquil green pastures, wooded gorges and the two dramatic wild moors in the National Parks of Dartmoor and Exmoor.

Choose Devon for its walking variety, and you'll find that the popular image of cream teas and thatched cottages is true - but that Devon is so much more once you explore it on two feet. Coast to coast routes like the Two Moors Way will offer a journey through it all from the wild northern shores that inspired the Romantic poets to the maritime ports of the south coast. Get a Quote Overview Free your soul and clear your mind! Walking on the wild moors of these National Parks is a wonderful antidote to modern living. England's last true wilderness, Dartmoor offers 365 square miles of virtually uninhabited freedom with high moors and twisted dramatic granite tors a land of myths, ghosts and legends. Exmoor, its smaller and more gentle neighour, is 250 Square miles of near perfect and unique beauty, with high uplands swathed in heather and steep, wooded gorges and rushing streams. See Dartmoor ponies and Exmoor stags in these wildlife rich areas, home to 30 species of mammals and over 240 types of bird.

The moors offer a unique opportunity for more challenging walking where the only human sound you will hear is the rhythm of your own breath. Get a Quote Overview Avoid the crowds and discover “Secret Somerset” missed by so many rushing headlong for the far South West. The 'land of the summer people' was named in a time when this area could only be visited in the summer months as the sea receded. Today its a rich, fertile and 'for real' landscape crowned by the fine walking ridges of the Mendip and Quantock Hills both protected areas of outstanding natural beauty. Rising up over King Arthur‘s Vale of Avalon along with the magical Tor at Glastonbury, walkers will find hidden gorges, wooded combes and the best inland panoramas of the South West. Also boasting its own Jurassic Coast Path, providing a gateway into the wilds of Exmoor National Park, Somerset offers walking routes without the crowds for those who want to find..... what the rest miss. Get a Quote Overview Dorset has a comfortable old world “English” feel to it and its walking routes traverse a rather more green and agricultural land of thatched cottages, cream teas.... and fossils !

Walkers here will find the more gentle rolling farmland, pretty villages and chalk ridges beloved by Thomas Hardy that sweep down to end abruptly at the World Heritage Jurassic Coast. Here, alongside the sea, those after more challenging routes can take a walking holiday through time itself amongst the dramatic chalk stacks, cliffs and arches of the Dorsetshire fossil coast. An area that can be very busy in high season but often suits walkers looking for more gentle and less exposed walking than the far west of the region. Get a Quote Overview Wales offers some of the best walking and outdoor activities to be had anywhere in the world. The 870-mile Welsh Coast Path was only fully opened in 2012 and is the world's first walk along the entire coast of a nation. The terrain is on an equally grand scale with towering cliffs, vast stretches of unspoilt golden sands, imposing castles, offshore islands and to the north there is the backdrop of Snowdonia National Park with its stunning mountains.

Wales in general offers walkers great value for money compared to more popular areas like Cornwall with walking options to suit everyone, from those who want the cosmopolitan restaurants and facilities of towns like Tenby and St Davids, through to isolated and remote forests and coastal hills that sit on the very cusp of the Snowdonian Peaks. Bursting with confidence and pride in its “Welshness”, its Celtic history, language and culture there has never been a better time for walkers to enter Wales. Get a Quote Overview The South West Coast Path is the UK's longest National Trail and one of the top ten walking routes in the world. It snakes, dips and rises continuously on its way through a staggering 1014km (630 miles) of pristine coastline, 450 miles of which is through nationally protected areas. It's a challenge too; walking the entire South West Coast Path is the equivalent to scaling Mount Everest four times! From towering cliffs to hidden coves, ghostly tin mines to lush subtropical wooded creeks. One minute a dramatic rock theatre hewn out of the cliffs, the next a prehistoric fossilized forest or a 20thC Art Deco Island Hotel.

What sets The South West Coast Path apart from other trails is that around almost every corner is yet another surprise as you retrace the footsteps and histories of the tin miners, fisherman, smugglers, wreckers and the customs men who chased them. Georgian manor house which inspired Daphne du Maurier to write Hungry Hill to be sold for £695,000 | Daily Mail Online Georgian manor house which inspired Daphne du Maurier to write Hungry Hill to be sold for £695,000 Mansion in Carmarthenshire, South Wales, stands in a 34 acre plot of land It is 'immediately recognisable' from the novel, which was published in 1943 'It still retains the charm conjured up by du Maurier in her magnificent story' The property has been owned by the same family for nearly 200 years comments A country mansion with a novel history is up for sale 70 years after it inspired acclaimed British writer Daphne du Maurier. The six-bedroom romantic Georgian manor house was made famous by du Maurier's semi-historical novel Hungry Hill, which was published in 1943.

The property in Carmarthenshire, South Wales, which is in need of renovation and stands at the end of a private drive in a 34-acre plot of land, has a guide price of £695,000. Inspiration: The Grade II-listed manor house in South Wales inspired Daphne du Maurier's novel Hungry Hill For sale: The Georgian mansion sits within a 34-acre plot of land and has a guide price of £695,000 Historic: The property, which has been in the same family since the 1820s, is in need of restoration The novel is an account of feuding families through the generations and details how its Puxley family owners - renamed Brodrick in the book - lived in the mansion at Llantharog. The family business was mined copper in Cork, Ireland, and they needed a place in Carmarthenshire in order to be in easy reach of Swansea Bay, where the metal was unloaded from ships crossing the Irish Sea. The book covers a century from 1820 to 1920 and was made into a film in 1947.

It was du Maurier's 10th work of fiction. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share The lengthy book was a best seller in its day but has become a of forgotten title du Maurier, who is best known for her 1938 novel Rebecca. Du Maurier was born in London in 1907 and died in Cornwall in 1989 at the age of 81. She was made a Dame in 1969 but never used the title.

Dan Rees, a property agent with Savills, said: 'The house is a gentlemen's residence that still retains aspects of the charm conjured up by Du Maurier in her magnificent story of life in the late Victorian era.' Novelist: Dame Daphne du Maurier, pictured in 1988 with her west highland terriers, died in 1989 Family home: The property's owners hope to sell it to a Welsh family who will 'enjoy it' like they did Acclaimed: Hungry Hill was the 10th work of fiction by du Maurier and was made into a film in 1947 Owner Charles Puxley, whose ancestors bought the estate originally in the 1820s, said it is instantly recognisable in Du Maurier's book. He said: 'It was once part an estate of 200 acres and is steeped in my family's history. There are many references to it and it is immediately recognisable in Hungry Hill.

Lengthy: There have been 33 editions of Hungry Hill 'The names were all changed but the house, referred to as Llatharog, was vividly described and the driveway, which sees carriages thundering down it is just as in the book.' Mr Puxley, whose family occupied the property until the 1930s when it was rented out, said it was a truly enchanting place. But Mr Puxley, who is based in London, said while the sale of the property came with some regret, it should be handed over to another family to enjoy. He said: 'The property is in need of restoration and while we could invest in doing that, it would only be to let it out again and we didn't feel that would be the best return for us. 'In many ways we feel it would be better to be in the ownership of a Welsh family who could own it and enjoy it the way my family have for the last 200 years. 'I'd much rather that than see it let by me, living 150 miles away.' The house lies around one mile from the village of Llanddarog and eight miles east of Carmarthen.

Mr Rees said it was rare that a Grade II-listed building with such appeal comes on the market He said: 'It certainly is a magical place sitting privately in its 34 acres and because of its link to Daphne du Maurier. 'When I first saw the house last autumn I was immediately impressed by it and the link to du Maurier was an amazing coincidence as my wife was reading one of her other novels, Frenchman's Creek, at the time.' Steeped in history: The house, once part of a 200 acre estate, is 'immediately recognisable' in Hungry Hill Regret: The Puxley family are sad to be saying goodbye to the property after nearly 200 years 'Magical place': The house lies around a mile from Llanddarog and eight miles east of Carmarthen

Question: About which county did Daphne Du Maurier usually write
Answer: Cornwall